Forgeries

( Literary ). Bertram ( C. Julius ), profe or of English at Copenhagen, profe ed to have discovered, in 1747, the De Situ Britanniæ of Richard us Corinensis, in the library of that city; and in 1757 he published it with two other treatises, calling the whole The Three Writers on the Ancient History of the British Nations (better known as Script ores Tres ). His forgery was exposed by J.E. Mayor, in his preface to Ricardi de Cirencestria Speculum Hist or i ale . Chatter ton ( Thomas ), in 1777, published certain poems, which he affirmed were written in the fifteenth century by Thomas Rowley, a monk. The poets Gray and Mason detected the forgery. His other literary forgeries were: (1) The Pedigree of Burgum (a Bristol pewterer), profe ed to have been discovered in the muniment-room of St. Mary’s Church, Redcliffe. He accordingly printed a history of the “De Bergham” family, with a poem called The Romaunt of the Cnyghte , by John de Bergham (fourteenth century). (2) A forged account of the opening of the old bridge, signed “Dunhelmus Bristol i ens is,” and profe ing to have been copied from an old MS. (3) An Account of Bristol , by Turgotus, “translated out of Saxon into English, by T. Rowley.” This forgery was made for the use of Mr. Catcott, who was writing a history of Bristol. Ireland ( S. W. H. ) published, in folio, 1796, Miscellaneous Papers and Instruments, under the hand and seal of William Shakespeare, including the tragedy of King Lear and a small fragment of Hamlet, from the original , price £4 4 s . He actually produced MSS. which he had forged, and which he pretended were original. On April 2, 1796, the play of Vortigern and Rowena , “from the pen of Shakespeare,” was announced for representation. It drew a most crowded house; but the fraud was detected, and Ireland made a public declaration of his impositions, from beginning to end. Mentz , who lived in the ninth century, published fifty-nine decretals, which he a erted were by Isidore of Seville, who lived three centuries previously. The object of these forged letters was to exalt the papacy and to corroborate certain dogmas. At Bremen, in 1837, were printed nine books of Sanchoni´athon , and it was said that the MSS. had been discovered in the convent of St. Maria de Merinhâo by a Colonel Pereira in the Portuguese army; but it was ascertained that there was no such convent, nor any such colonel, and that the paper of this “ancient” MS. bore the water-mark of Osnabrück paper-mills.